Saudi tourists visiting Barcelona prefer to stay in Ciutat Vella while Japanese prefer to stay in l’Eixample; average spending by Chinese visitors is 429 € / day while a Swedish tourist just spends 94 € / day; many tourists arriving by cruise ship to the Catalan capital do not visit the city. We know these facts thanks to a big data study which analyzes the mobile phone data of tourists and matches it with the data of credit-card payments made by foreigners.

Local authorities, year after year, are publishing statistics of tourists, and their data may change with big data. If we consider the latest reports published by the National Statistics Institute (INE), Spain received in 2015 just over 68 million international tourists. During the same period, a total of 8.3 million tourists stayed in Barcelona. Both are record figures but are they real or are these statistics a rough estimate?

CEO of RocaSalvatella and digital marketing expert, who explaines how big data will revolutionize the tourism sector. Are tourist destinations like Barcelona taking advantage of big data to manage better the flow of visitors they receive? What possibilities do we face now with the use of this data?

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx